Video and the Pacific Northwest

Vanessa Renwick’s “Portrait # 2: Trojan” rolls along the Columbia River and moves on to industrial underpinnings before tracking birds as they fly under bridges and wheel off into the sky. The Trojan nuclear power plant is an intrusion into that scene, but it’s inevitable, right? Wrong. Renwick filmed not only its cold allure but also its demise, the way smoke from its implosion curled in strands that blurred the trees, floated out onto the river and were gone.

A boy kicks in a glass window and pumps his fist. Fans beat each other to the ground. Where are the police? But the police are a larger gang, marching down the street in riot gear and thumping their plastic shields to the beat. Welcome to Earth. If there is, as e.e. cummings predicted, a “hell of a good universe next door,” let’s not go. We’d ruin it.